Medical Aid in Dying: New Frontiers in Medicine, Law, and Culture

Abstract

Medical aid in dying (MAID) has been a productive target for social scientific inquiry at the intersections of law and medicine over the past two decades. Insofar as MAID crystallizes and reflects personal and cultural understandings of key concepts such as individualism, dependency, dignity, and care, it is a rich site for social scientific theorizing. This article reviews and assesses the contributions of social scientific perspectives to research on MAID. We propose that social scientific research on MAID offers four distinctive contributions: its descriptive (rather than normative) orientation, its focus on cultural meanings, its insights into processes of knowledge production, and its comparative lens. The article's major sections describe (a) attitudes toward MAID, (b) MAID-related social movements, (c) legalization approaches, and (d) lived experiences of MAID in permissive jurisdictions. We conclude by reflecting on how MAID scholarship can inform social inquiry into other areas in which law and medicine converge.